The creative process of healing or: "When am I going to be better"?

In the first psychotherapy sessions, more and more people ask me:

1. How long will it take me to heal?
2. How many sessions do I need to attend to feel better?
3. What solutions do you have for me? 

Today I will answer the first question. First of all, let me ask you how long did it take you to come to the point where you seek professional help? How long did it take you to be anxious, to be depressed, to have panic attacks, to not trust yourself? If you can answer these questions, you are a step ahead in the healing process. But most of the people that seek professional help are very confused about when “all of these things happened”.

The beginning of every healing process is being aware that you struggle! You can take your first step in this process by engaging in a psychotherapy process. But…

Your healing process depends on many aspects and I will list here some of them: 

• your motivation to feel better, 
• your confidence in the therapy process and in the psychotherapist that you choose (I will write a separate post on this topic), 
• psychotherapist’s abilities and competencies
• your perseverance and engagement (if you come to three sessions and feel better and end the therapy process, then don’t expect to feel better for the rest of your life; think about the analogy with going to the gym - after 3 sessions you are stronger, but you can’t lift 100 kg or run 15 km if you just started training)
• the level of gravity of your difficulties
• the support that you have outside the psychotherapy office, and many more. 

...so it could take, for example, 2, 6, 11 months or even years taking into consideration these variables. 

Notice how you feel about this apparent uncertainty. Try to ask yourself why do you need to know the exact moment when healing “ends”? What would that “end” bring you? Some of the answers could be: you would know that you are happy again, not in pain anymore, recovered. From this perspective, I can assure you that therapy has more than one ending: every time you (together with your therapist) manage to solve a part of the problem or challenge, you “end” an inner process, you put pieces together so that you are closer to being whole again. 

Therefore, you can feel recovered more than one time in therapy. You don’t need to wait for the “ending” to enjoy the process!